On a recent October weekend we visited a local West County winery. Sitting outside in the brisk air we learned that they, along with their sister establishments, required indoor masking for all visitors and staff. All staff were vaccinated and all visitors were seated outdoors.
Later that evening we went to see the latest Wes Anderson movie at our local Rialto theater and a young employee diligently checked our proof of vaccination before we could enter.
And at a recent music event at our local Hopmonk Tavern, we were asked to be masked while the broad-beamed and imposing bouncer checked our vax status.
In each instance I thanked these employees for holding the line. In each instance they uniformly confessed that they rarely if ever received a kind word.Sponsored
Quite the contrary. Nearly every one that I spoke with had been attacked, screamed at, or abused in one way or another. Some teared up as they related their stories.
As public health departments across the country have become gutted, our service workers and small-business owners who, at times independently implemented and enforced mask, vaccine, and social distancing protocol, have in effect become front-line public health workers.
This is a job which they did not ask for, did not want, were not trained for, and that most definitely was not in their job description.
We may at last be on the verge of being able to experience a public life that feels almost normal. It’s happening despite uncivil behavior. And if we, in fact, succeed, it will be because of common citizens: baristas, and checkout clerks, hostesses and movie theater owners, exercised an uncommon valor.
A deluge of rain outside, though the air is saturated with a brilliant light.
Perhaps these are not great things, but they are the small matter that is my life.
———
I intended to reflect this morning on this slightly beyond the midpoint, but instead I found myself texting the son of a friend who sat somewhat bored in his high school history class in Rhode Island.
Why?Because he faces forward.And because I am facing back.And I can’t help but think that he could use an outstretched hand if not from me, than perhaps his future self.Someone perhaps to just assure him that everything is going to be alright.
———
On most days I work on the creek.Our friends call it Frog Creek, but I call it the Mighty Froggy. I imagine it as having the grandiosity of the Mississippi, the potent history of the Ganges, the raging force of the Amazon.
But it’s really just a little creek that cuts across the property.
And when asked, I tell people that I’m restoring it, but really I just spend a few hours each day carrying about buckets of dirt and stone debris and placing fallen branches against the banks.
I watch how the water flows.I’ve learned a little bit about water and silt.I’m slowly learning the personality and rhythm’s of this little stretch of water and the plants and animals that co-inhabit it.I tell myself that by doing this I am making the world a better place.
Granted, it’s not much.So little in fact, that my wife rightly asks if that’s what I want to be doing with my life.
The answer is, well, no.But it is, in fact, what I am doing.For whatever that’s worth.
———
On the occasion of his fortieth birthday, Joseph Brodsky wrote
I have waded the steppes that saw yelling Huns in saddles,
worn the clothes nowadays back in fashion in every quarter,
planted rye, tarred the roofs of pigsties and stables,
guzzled everything save dry water.
Even with an additional 14 years logged, my life has lacked such grandeur.I have braved neither wild beasts nor steel cages.Depending of course on what kind of steel cages to which one might be referring.
Brodsky was born in Leningrad, but I might hazard that he was really born in St. Petersburg, or affectionately known as Pyötr by native born Russians.
His language seems to predate all things Soviet. And his body now sleeps in the San Michelle Cemetery, in the Venice lagoon, in the spit of that city that he so loved, the canaled dream that he ventured to only in winter because it reminded him of some foggy glassine version of the city from which he’d come.
Fitting that the rising oceans will subsume equally his native city and his final resting place.
The summer after he won the Nobel prize I was in Moscow during the optimistic dead center years of perestroika.I was there on a general tourist visa under the auspices of Volunteers for Peace which sponsored non-traditional tourism in the Soviet Union.While there, the organizer, Peter Coldwell from Vermont, fell ill, or broke his back or legs or something, and he had to return home.I was one of the few participants who spoke a bit of Russian so he asked me to assist two graduate students at Moscow State University in coordinating things for the group.
The day after Peter left, however, the students, pulled all 25 of us together.They were exhausted, yet running on a kind of manic energy.They had to apologize.It was terrible, they said, but they had done the impossible.It had taken days, but an opportunity had presented itself and at unheard of pace and through good fortune they had commandeered the necessary papers and resources. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity, they tearfully explained, for which they had to abandon everything. In a few hours they would board a plane and they would fly to New York City in America.They were going to visit Joseph Brodsky.
You are in charge, now, they told me.And one sobbed and hugged me as he stepped off the bus.I’m so sorry we are letting you all down, he said.I am so sorry.
On my 54th birthday I wonder about those two graduate students.And I wonder about the conversations that they must have had with the poet.
And I wonder if this in fact even happened, or if it happened in the way that I recall.If our lives are composed of memories and those memories themselves are suspect, then what really do we have left to call our own?
———
We all are in the process of dying.
I think today of friends who, if not dying, are driving perilously close to the abyss.And I can say for certain that such a vantage, despite its commensurate fear and sadness, promotes a heightened if not unwelcome sense of living.That’s not meant as a consolation because there can be none.So it stands only as an assertion of limited truth.
I think of you all because you’re the ones I want in the room right now.
———
This morning I also binge listen to my daughter’s music.I listen to her all of seventeen singing on an open stage one of the first songs she had ever written.
She writes far more fluently than I ever did at her age. And I would trade all my future years for the youthfulness and competence and execution of her written voice.
So perhaps if ever there were to be a suggestion of what I’m feeling on this day, fifty-four years from when I was born, it would be this.
And I tell myself as I do each year, I am going to write something for you all.
Snowflakes Edge 